knife edge
by Gingerninjaunicorn
Summary: "It's like his life is balancing on a knife edge; one wrong move and he goes tumbling off the edge, into darkness and the end of all things." Owen's life in colours. Owen/Katie, slight Owen/Tosh.


**_Disclaimer: all rights belong to the BBC and RTD. I'm just borrowing their characters. _**

**1 – Fire engine red. **

Melina Harper's hair was fire engine red. Or it once was, at least. Now it's washed out and pale, much like the woman herself, and the roots are dull brown, and grey weaves through it.  
Owen Harper – seven years old and still believing that the world is kind and good – sits on the dusty kitchen floor and watches her cook. His litter sister, Ellie sits beside him, playing with her teddy. Ellie's only four, and Owen always finds himself having to protect her because Ellie seems to attract trouble, as well as their mother's anger. Melina doesn't often cook, usually bringing home leftovers from the bistro she did night shifts at, or ordering cheap take away so when she actually _cooks _Owen watched every move, wondering what the occasion was but not daring to ask.  
Melina's hands were once elegant and beautiful, but now they are lined and calloused and the blood-red nail polish chipped, but like every child Owen still thinks his mother is most beautiful woman in the world, even when she screams and cries and throws her grandma's china across the room. Owen watched Melina's once-beautiful hands chop up capsicum – fire engine red, it is, like Melina's hair should have been – with a blunt knife, grubby silver and just about ready for retirement, and Owen wonders what exactly the occasion is to have Melina so stressed and preoccupied she barely even notices when she nicks her finger and blood trickles onto the chopping board.  
Finally, Melina looks up and catches Owen's gaze on her, and she snaps at him to do something less than pleasant, and Owen picks Ellie up and scurries off to their room, where he opens his comic book and starts to read, even though he's read it a dozen times already since he got it. Ellie is still playing with her teddy, curling up in Owen's lap and pressing a butterfly-light kiss to his cheek.  
Half an hour later, Owen's lured out of their room by the smell of home-cooked food, just in time to see their mother dump the tray of perfectly good lasagne in the rubbish bin.  
She doesn't cook again, not for a long while.

**2 – Pale green. **

When Owen is nine and Ellie is six, he packs a bag and runs away to the nicer parts of London. He wanders around until it is dark, and then he gets grabbed by a man in a tatty coat, and Owen doesn't even think before he kicks back as hard as he can, bites down on the hand over his mouth, struggles free and _runs. _  
Owen's always been a good runner, and more than once the PE teacher at school wrote home to suggest he join a track team or something of the like, and he's never felt freer than he does right now, sprinting through the streets of London in the dark, and he runs until he finds a policewoman on the beat, and he tells her in a small as voice as he could conquer up that he's lost and he wants to go home, and she takes him.  
Her name is Olivia, she tells him cheerfully. She grew with four sisters and a beagle called Charlie, and she's nice and kind that by the time they reach Owen's home he's developed a full blown crush on her.  
Her eyes are the prettiest pale green, and when she smiles her whole faces lights up. She tells him sternly he must never run away again, and when she knocks on the door, Melina answers in her dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and eyes them suspiciously.  
"What's he done, then?" she asks. "Whatever is it, I'm not payin' for the damage."  
Olivia glances at Owen, and asks Melina if she can come in.  
Fifteen minutes later, Owen watches her drive away and spends the rest of the night getting screamed at. Ellie cowers behind his leg, sucking on her thumb, tears streaming down her face.

**3 – Golden brown. **

After the disaster of his tenth birthday, Owen had given up on the idea of birthday wishes. Or any wishes really, because if they ever came true he wouldn't be living on a council estate with a woman who spent most of her time angry and drunk, and a little girl who never smiled.  
But when Owen is fifteen his best mate, Jimmy, drags him off on the tube and they spend the day bumming around London, chatting up girls and smoking nicked cigarettes, and Owen starts to believe in birthdays again.  
A year later, he gets kicked out of home, and he's surprised when Jimmy's parents offer their spare room, and he's even more surprised when they tell him he can stay for as long as he wants. Ellie – fourteen, already falling in with the wrong crowd – comes to visit, and he feels so bloody helpless as she fades away from him, possibly for ever.  
She stops coming to see him after three months, and the first time he goes home – no, it's not home, it's Ellie and Melina's, now – she doesn't even look at him as she tells him his busy, and Melina screams him off the property.  
He ends up staying at Jimmy's for two years; until he finishes high school and heads off to medical school – he's been working for it since he was ten years old, saving up the cash since he was fourteen and he ends up in a tiny flat, passing his exams with flying colours because he's a bloody genius, even though he barely has time to study because he's always working to pay for his tuition, but even though he's so tired he can barely think by the time he collapses under his golden brown duvet at night, he's never been happier. Or sadder.  
He's not really surprised when Ellie – seventeen, crying, mascara smudged down her face - shows up on his door, suffering off two broken hearts, and he doesn't say anything as he draws her into his arms, and lets her cry on his shoulder, and suddenly they are ok again.

**4 – Violet. **

Sometimes it's like his life is balancing on a knife edge; one wrong move and he goes tumbling off the edge, into darkness and the end of all things. And then he meets Katie.  
She's bright and funny, and everywhere she goes the world is a little brighter, like she's the sun and he's a planet orbiting around her.  
Katie's the one to ask him out. They end up walking through London in the rain, eating chips and swapping stories.  
Katie's funny and bubbly, and she teases him to no end and he could spend every second of his life with her.  
They date for three months before they move in together. Katie's family are posh and just a bit snobby, and they don't like Owen much. Owen doesn't care, and neither does Katie. They spend Christmas day together, and in the afternoon Ellie catches the tube up and they end up wandering around London – it's strange how Owen always ends up wandering around London, with or without those he loves – and he's genuinely happy, and he wonders why it feels strange.  
_You know, Mother, packing my bags and kicking me out was the best thing you ever did, _Owen writes on the Christmas card he sends home, and he never gets a reply, but it's ok.

Katie's favourite colour is violet. She wears a violet ribbon around her wrist and never takes it off. She's wearing it when Owen proposes; she wears it when she goes wedding dress shopping with her mates, when she goes for coffee with Ellie.  
Then one day she wanders into the kitchen, looking dazed and confused, and asks why she's got a ribbon around her wrist.  
Two days later she doesn't know who Ellie is, and that's when everything starts to fall apart.

**5 – Midnight blue. **

At first glance the tattoos look black, but they aren't. They're actually midnight blue, so dark it's nearly hard to see the colour, but in the sunlight you can see it.  
They were Katie's idea, the tattoos. She'd always wanted one, and ended up dragging Owen and Ellie along with her because Owen was her devote fiancé and Ellie is his younger sister who was no stranger to getting her skin inked, and at the end of the day all three of them walked away with different designs.  
Ellie got a smattering of stars along her collar bone; Katie a robin on her wrist, and Owen a tribal design along his right shoulder blade.  
Katie is tracing the robin on her wrist as the Alzheimer's specialist questions her. She's scared but not showing it, and Owen's hand is on her knee, calm, strong, reassuring.  
Katie is brave, right up until she dies on an operating table, surrounded by dead doctors with an alien in her brain.

**6 – Charcoal grey. **

The American's eyes are light blue, studded with flecks of charcoal grey. Owen can't forget them, no matter how hard he tries. Everyone believes he's gone mad, that the loss of Katie has driven him around the bend but he's not crazy, he knows he's not.  
Ellie, wonderful Ellie, believes him. She's always believed in the crazy and the out there, and they spend weeks searching for any record of him, of alien parasites living in peoples brains but they come up trumps.  
And then he's there, standing at the edge of the graveyard, in his stupid big grey coat, and Owen tackles him to the ground, fists flying, and ends up crying onto his chest.  
His name is Captain Jack Harkness, and he is charming and sincere and wants Owen to work for him, hunting aliens in bloody Cardiff.  
He almost tells him to go stuff himself, but then he remembers the pain he felt in the aftermath of Katie's death and how he yearned to save people when he was a little boy and says yes instead.  
If he can save just one person, prevent anyone from feeling that pain, it'll be worth it.

**7 – Shining white. **

Toshiko Sato is small and mousy and quiet, with a fragile aura around her that makes Owen want to steer clear of her. Jack is sketchy on details of her past when Owen asks, but three weeks into his new job they get locked in a tiny cell for five hours and Toshiko cries silent tears.  
When she smiles at him, however, when he puts a hesitant arm around her shoulder, her teeth shine bright white and he realises she is beautiful.  
Suzie Costello is dark and dangerous, and a disaster waiting to happen. A ticking time bomb. She's also sort of a mess, but when she smiles it's like that of a shark, and yet in time Owen finds himself sharing her bed.  
He can't pretend he doesn't hate himself, afterwards.  
But before he shags Suzie, before he notices Toshiko's beauty, he's got to say goodbye to Ellie. Or so Jack says.  
"You can't tell her, Owen," he says, not unkindly. "And if you spend too much time around her you might let something slip. It'll be best for all our sakes if you keep limited contact with her."  
But Owen's never like rules much, and he ends up telling her all about Torchwood and swearing her to secrecy.  
Ellie's good about it. Fascinated, spooked, but she never told a soul and she was a listening ear after a long day.  
He had a second mobile, one Torchwood didn't know about that he used to call her because he was fairly sure Jack was checking his logs to make sure he wasn't spilling national secrets to his baby sister. He was, but it wasn't any of Captain Jack Flash's business, really (ok, it was, but at heart Owen was still a rebellious teenager).  
Every once in a while Ellie made the trip down to Cardiff. She wasn't supposed to; Owen worked most of the time and Ellie had a job and a life back in London, and then there were Jack's bloody limited contact rules, but she did it anyway because Ellie didn't like rules either.  
And one night Owen had been dragged out Weevil hunting with Jack, when they heard a surprised shout and a thumb from a nearby alleyway.  
They were there in seconds, and the scene took Jack by surprise. Owen, not so much.  
The Weevil was unconscious, and a young woman stood over it. She was holding a hefty piece of wood aloft, and Owen would have laughed if Ellie hadn't been bleeding from three gashes on her forearm. Defence wounds; he'd seen them in the hospital.  
"Miss, are you ok?" Jack was asking, stepping forward to take her elbow.  
"Oh, yeah," Ellie said a little breathlessly. "Fine. What the hell was that?"  
She looked right through Owen as if he didn't exist, and he really loved his sister sometimes.  
"He's just in a mask, its ok," Jack replied.  
"'He' has claws_,_" Ellie glared at Jack as if he was an idiot. "What is it, some kind of genetic experiment gone wrong?"  
"Yes," said Jack, producing a small white Retcon pill from his coat pocket. "And his claws have a kind of poison in them. Nothing deadly, but it will make you sick unless you take this," he handed her the Retcon and a bottle of water.  
Ellie took the pill, placed it in her mouth and upended the bottle, but Owen knew his sister and he knew that the second Jack looked away she would spit out the amnesia pill.  
She did, when Jack hefted the Weevil over his shoulder and took it to the SUV, leaving Owen behind to stitch her wounds with the emergency medical kit.  
"Hey, brother," Ellie greeted once Jack was out of ear shot. "That was one of them amnesia pills, right?"  
"Yep," Owen replied. "And what the hell are you doing here?"  
"Visiting you."  
"No, in an alley way with a monster."  
"Oh, I heard a scream," Ellie shrugged. "Came to investigate, found that, growling at some really wimpy man that actually pissed his pants. Poor bloke."  
"Poor you, you idiot, you could have died."  
"Nah. I survived seventeen years with Melina Harper, a monster is nothing."  
Owen was still laughing when Jack came back.

**8 – Sky blue. **

Owen doesn't like the butler.  
He likes the idea of a butler, someone to clean up after him and get him coffee and biscuits, but the handsome young man in the expensive suit is dislikeable, at least in Owen's opinion.  
Tosh doesn't seem to think so – she always makes an effort to strike up conversations with him, invite him to drinks with the team, but he always declines. The butler – Jones, but Owen just calls him 'tea-boy' – just seems to want to fade away into the background, to be invisible.  
After Owen learns he worked at One, he's convinced the quite, well-spoken butler is planning to kill them all on Yvonne Hartman's dying orders.  
But the tea-boy never fails to deliver Owen's morning coffee in the sky-blue mug the exact shade of Katie's eyes, and after a while Owen just lets Ianto Jones fade into the background.  
It's nice to have a butler.

**9 – Silver. **

Owen finds out that Katie is in the Torchwood morgue four weeks after they find the glove.  
It's by accident, and mostly Suzie's fault, because the woman who is slowly becoming obsessed with bringing people back to life is going through the records to find suitable corpses to resurrect, and lets out a low whistle which draws his attention to her.  
"Oi, Owen, listen to this," Suzie laughs. "There's a girl in our morgue who died of an alien parasite in her brain that released a toxic gas and killed a whole operating theatre."  
Owen snaps then, pushing Suzie aside to see the information, and sure enough it read _Katherine Russel, age 20. _  
He grabs Suzie by the wrist and drags her down to the morgue, snatching up the glove as they went, but no matter how hard Suzie tried Katie wouldn't come back, and when Owen got back to his flat he screamed at the world and put his foot through his television.  
Then, with a bottle of scotch in one hand and his mobile in the other, he dialled and cried to his little sister.

**10 – Yellow. **

Gwen Cooper's favourite colour is yellow, Owen discovers. He's not sure why this bothers him; only that it doesn't suit her and suits her at the same time.  
He asks her why one say, and when she replies that it makes her happy he scoffs and she glares, but in the end it doesn't really matter because Suzie is dead in a drawer beneath them, and sooner or later everyone dies and Owen thinks he may be becoming steadily more and more pessimistic and wonders why on Earth Tosh has got a crush on someone as bitter as him.

**11 – Silver, mark ii. **

Lisa Hallet is dead, metal imbedded in her flesh, and Owen decided he doesn't hate Ianto so much anymore.  
Maybe that's why he smuggles alien technology Jack had strictly banned out of the hub to help heal Ianto after the affair with the cannibals, and maybe why he doesn't tell Jack about the alien gadgets scattered around Ianto's flat and only advices the young man to hide them in case Jack pops around, and Ianto looks at Owen with understanding in his eyes and Owen realises Ianto probably does know everything after all.  
Well, everything apart from the fact that their boss fancies him.  
Ianto can be dim sometimes.

Owen doesn't feel bad about shagging Gwen, who's in a committed relationship. He's been through too much shit, and just wants to forget. Gwen is a willing participant that he doesn't have to buy drinks for first, and he tries not to resent her for her unfaithfulness to Rhys.

**12 – Chocolate brown. **

Diane's eyes are chocolate brown, as is her hair and Owen hasn't felt love like this since he was a naïve young doctor with dreams of getting married.  
Diane is amazing. She's like ice and fire, she's like no one he's ever met before and he's managed to convince himself that he can be normal, with her, live a normal life when she flies her plane through the rift and into the unknown.  
He feels like his heart has been ripped out and eaten by a Weevil.  
Ironically, a week later he nearly lets himself get eaten by one.

Owen knows opening the rift is a bloody stupid thing to do, a really bloody stupid thing, and he gets shot for it.  
He's not really surprised that Ianto shot him, not as much as he should be, and he still manages to open the rift with a bullet hole in his shoulder and he sees that as a win, at least until the world goes to shit with Romans and the plague and spaceships and all sorts of madness.  
He shots Jack once in the head and twice in the chest and tries not to feel bad about it, because he's fairly sure Jack's going to come back, because despite what the captain might think, they aren't idiots.  
Owen's a doctor, and he's seen Jack's bloody and torn clothes, knows he's never not once had to patch Jack up and knows it's not possible for Jack to pull all the stunts he does and come away uninjured.  
And Owen knows that Ianto knows that Jack's probably immortal because Ianto is the archivist and Owen has checked; Jack has records going back over a hundred years, and he knows Tosh knows because it's Tosh's job to monitor the CCTV and the comms and she's no doubt heard/seen him die.  
Abbadon happens, then it unhappens (Owen hates when time resets itself, it's bloody annoying, if not convenient) and Jack runs off with the Doctor (they know about Jack being a companion, too. They're not _stupid_) and Torchwood feels like it's about to fall apart, and they need more people, so Owen does what he must do and soon they've got two ex-UNIT soldiers working for them, as well as Ellie because when she heard he was hiring she wouldn't take no for an answer.  
He almost starts to like the new Torchwood, the Torchwood without Jack, and then the Captain returns home in a blaze of glory and swishing coattails and takes over again.  
He sends the UNIT blokes packing, tried to Retcon Ellie (Owen almost laughs when Jack thinks that would actually work) and then his ex-wife, who is very much a man, comes through the rift, poisons Gwen, head-butts Tosh (later Owen will remember that he threatened to kill Hart is he hurt Tosh and wonders if he's developing feelings for her), holds a gun to Ianto's head, shots Owen (Owen is really getting sick of being used for target practise), pushes Jack off a building and nearly blows up Cardiff for a diamond that doesn't even exist, and the Owen decides he's not nearly paid enough.

**13 – Mauve. **

The dress Tosh had worn for Tommy was mauve, and Owen wondered why he was jealous. Tosh wasn't his, no way. Maybe she had a silly crush on him, but at the end of the day it'd never happen.  
But he found himself insanely jealous when he saw them together, and a horrible, bitter part of him was glad Tosh would never see Tommy again.  
Owen had always suspected he was a bad person, and apparently it was true.

When Rhys is in the hub he tries his best not to let on that he has slept with the Welshman's fiancé.  
Rhys is a nice guy, Owen concludes, if a bit…mundane. And Owen wonders if he knew that the woman he took a bullet for would leave him without a second thought if Jack so much as indicated he wanted Gwen.

After that there is the missing two days, and then Martha Jones shows up and everything changes.  
He asks Tosh on a date, but they never get round to it because he's busy flirting with Martha, working the case, dying, etc.

**14 – Orange. **

Death is darkness and nothing, and then he's lying on the autopsy slab and Tosh is telling him she loves him and there is a cold metal hand on his head and _are they fucking serious? _  
And then he is dead again, but he is walking, talking, and Death is trying to get into the world through him and it's all bloody terrifying.  
After the ordeal at the hospital, he catches a train to London because he doesn't trust himself to drive and he ends up on Ellie's door.  
Ellie has a fat orange cat that hisses at him and swipes at his hand, and when its claws open his skin there is no blood.  
Ellie is freaked out, but takes it well. She holds his cold, dead hand and makes a joke, and they laugh, and Owen decides that maybe he'd be ok.  
Two days later he meets a girl on a rooftop called Maggie, and he saves her life by showing her there is still hope. He also yells at Tosh, tries to drown himself, and sits with an old man as he dies, but Maggie's face stays with him for months because something about her reminded him of Katie.

Gwen's wedding is a total disaster, but he gets to hold Tosh in his (cold, dead) arms while they dance, and Owen forgets his self-loathing long enough to have fun before they Retcon all the guests and make their escape.

Then there's the creepy bloke and the mermaid woman who walked out of a film (Owen's still trying to process how that is even possible) and Gwen poking her nose into Jack's Flat Holm business (Ianto, Tosh and Owen all knew about that, too. Jack really isn't as good at keeping secrets as he thinks he is) and by the time they nearly get blown up by Jack's crazy ex-wife Owen is so tired he's just about passing out, but the dead don't sleep and he's got to carry on.

** 15 – Royal blue. **

Everything is a blur, but all he knows is there is a hoix and then Cardiff is burning, going up in smoke, Weevils are roaming the streets, and everyone is going mad, and then he's in a nuclear power station with Tosh's sweet voice in his ear and all he can think about is how he should have kissed her the day before he died, when she was wearing those royal blue earrings that framed her face, and wondered if he ever could have loved her.  
He probably could have, and he wished he'd gotten the chance. Wished he could have shown her that he knew she was special, knew she was worth it, but instead he resigned himself to whispering them to her over the comms. She made a noise that may have been a sob, and Owen asked her to tell Ellie that he loved her, and then there is no pain, no noise, worst of all no Tosh.  
Just darkness, and the end of all things.

_**A/N: leave a review to make me happy in my insomnia. That is all. **_


End file.
